“A Logo for America”

On a recent Thursday, the Chilean conceptual artist Alfredo Jaar celebrated a homecoming of sorts in midtown Manhattan. Just shy of midnight, he stood in Times Square, surrounded by a crowd of about fifty friends and supporters. All eyes were trained south, toward a billboard on Forty-second Street, where, between 11:57 P.M. and midnight, each night for the entire month of August, Jaar’s landmark work, “A Logo for America,” is playing on repeat.

The piece débuted in 1987 on the same billboard, which at the time was just a light-bulb-studded screen. (Thirty years later, it’s a sleek digital canvas, with high-definition L.E.D. technology.) Times Square was a darker place then, “basically just a red-light district,” Jaar said; now the streets are illuminated by shimmery billboards. “A Logo for America” opens with an image of the continental United States, and across it flash the words: “This Is Not America.” The font and the graphics are pixellated, and they look primitive in the Times Square of today, but more arresting for it. An image of an American flag follows, with a second disavowal: “This Is Not America’s Flag.” The word “America” blinks on the screen, in a bigger and bigger font, either a taunt or an exhortation, until the “r” transforms into a map of the whole of the Americas—North, Central, and South. It spins like a pinwheel, and for a moment the landmass resembles a pair of eyeglasses, as if to confirm that a misunderstanding is being couched and clarified. It’s all over in less than a minute.

“A Logo for America” is upbraiding us: when we say “America” and mean the U.S., we’re claiming a geography that isn’t our own. “It would be like the French calling themselves ‘Europe,’ ” Jaar said. Coming, as it did, at the end of a period of bloody U.S. interventions in the Americas, the message of the work was barbed, and many New Yorkers in 1987 were not pleased with Jaar’s remonstrance. Most commonly, “A Logo for America” was seen as an anti-American affront, which missed, but also proved, the point.

Earlier on Thursday evening, George Stonbely, an advertising executive who let Jaar use his sign for the début, recalled the drama that had accompanied the video’s première, as he toasted Jaar at the Lambs Club, on Forty-fourth Street. “People used to come up to our office on the fourth floor of 1 Times Square”—directly behind the sign—“and demand an explanation. We had to have our secretary memorize a script explaining the work,” he said, almost gleefully. This had been his company’s big foray into the art world.

Uptown, the Guggenheim is hosting “Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today,” through October; the exhibit is the occasion for Jaar’s Times Square reprise, and a small television on the fourth floor of the museum shows video footage of the first screening of “A Logo for America.” (The work is showing in its original setting as part of a two-year-old Times Square initiative called Midnight Moment, a collaboration between the Times Square Advertising Coalition and the public-art arm of the Times Square Alliance. All told, it’s an effort to defend Times Square against the understandable complaint that the neighborhood has become, as Jaar put it, “a mass consumerist ocean of advertising.”)

Much of Jaar’s recent work deals with immigration, and, more specifically, with the subject of exclusion. In 1995, for “One Million Finnish Passports,” he filled a room at the Helsinki Museum of Art with a million passports, stacked in tidy piles behind a glass wall that was ribbed with iron bars. (Finland has a notoriously stringent immigration policy.) Five years later, on the San Diego-Tijuana border, Jaar orchestrated “La Nube/The Cloud,” in which a cellist played plaintive songs on the American side of the border, while the artist set loose three thousand white balloons on the Mexican side, in an homage to the people who have died in illegal crossings.

When it first showed, “A Logo for America” ran every six minutes for a month. That was two hundred and forty times a day, seventy-two hundred airings in total. In time, the piece came to mean all sorts of things. One neighborhood official told me that the words “This Is Not America” were sometimes taken as an indictment of the seediness of Times Square. “I completely lost control over it,” Jaar said of the art work. “Which is a good thing.”

On Thursday, it seemed that only the initiates knew to look up in the moments before 11:57. The passersby who followed our gaze promptly got distracted by the bigger, flashier signs nearby. As the group quieted in anticipation, a woman standing next to us, in shorts and a tank top, doused herself with a bucket of water as a friend filmed and her entourage applauded. A workman in a hardhat told us to stand clear of a crane jutting out from a truck with the words “North Shore Neon Sign Company” written on its side. Jaar stared up, undistracted and undeterred.

If Jaar’s initial point was about U.S. disregard for Latin America, epitomized by our blithe presumption of continental identification, today’s Times Square is evidence of how easily and casually that’s come to pass. All around us were signs for Bank of America, American Apparel, and American Eagle.

These days, the phrase “this is not America” brings to mind a shrill nativist sentiment. There are eleven million undocumented immigrants in the United States, most of them from the Americas. Thousands of children have crossed the border this summer, while Congress casts about, half-heartedly, for a political solution. President Obama, formerly known as the Deporter-in-Chief, is currently considering unilateral action to beat the deadlock. Last month, the residents of a California town stopped three buses of immigrants, en route to a border-patrol station, chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” until the caravan had to turn around and head elsewhere. This was “America” as the wrong—and the most perverse—sort of slogan. In 1987, a flawed but promising immigration bill had recently passed. “A Logo for America” has returned during a summer marred by the failure of yet another immigration-reform push.

On Friday morning, Jaar and I corresponded by e-mail. (He uses America Online.) “The fact that my work’s message is still relevant today means that the general public’s perception of the US-America relationship has stagnated for twenty-seven years, if not worsened,” he wrote. One thing that hadn’t changed between 1987 and Thursday is the news ticker at Forty-second street, mounted just below Jaar’s work. The headlines snaked past, with still more news of the Americas. Argentina had just sued the United States before the International Court of Justice over U.S. court rulings that Argentina claimed had violated its sovereignty. Once again, “America” and the Americas were at odds. One onlooker, seeing the headline as “A Logo for America” wrapped, groaned in sympathy. It all looked so obvious, at least until the clock struck midnight.